Special Issue: Post-Neoliberalism?

Theory, Culture & Society

2021, Vol. 38(6) 29–50
The Alt-Right: ! The Author(s) 2021
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Neoliberalism, sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0263276421999446

Libertarianism and the journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs

Fascist Temptation
Melinda Cooper
Australian National University

Abstract
There is by now broad consensus in the critical literature that neoliberalism and
social conservatism have frequently coexisted in practice. Yet the alt-right fits none of
the previously identified alliances: this is not the neoliberal neoconservatism of the
Reagan and Bush years, nor the neoliberal communitarianism of the Third Way, nor
even a form of neoliberal authoritarianism. Instead, the alt-right claims intellectual
descent from economic libertarianism, on the one hand, and paleo- (as opposed to
neo-) conservatism on the other. This paper traces the contours of this ‘paleoliber-
tarian’ alliance, first by following the volatile political trajectory of Murray Rothbard,
the foremost philosopher of American libertarianism, and, second, by uncovering
precedents in the longer history of the American far right. It will be argued that
paleoconservatism makes for a uniquely powerful ally because it offers a workable
response to libertarianism’s intrinsic contradictions.

Keywords
alt-right, Austrian neoliberalism, libertarianism, paleoconservatism, Murray
Rothbard, Richard Spencer

Few thinkers have had a more profound influence on the new American
far right than the libertarian Murray Rothbard. Wherever they have
ended up, almost every leading figure on the alt-right started out as an
acolyte. Paul Gottfried, the paleoconservative scholar who is credited
with coining the term ‘alternative right’, counted Rothbard as a close
friend and enduring influence on his thinking (Gottfried, 1995). Richard
Spencer, founder of the Alternative Right website, cut his teeth on
Rothbard’s screeds against central banking and was once an enthusiastic

Corresponding author: Melinda Cooper. Email: melinda.cooper@anu.edu.au

TCS Online Forum: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
30 Theory, Culture & Society 38(6)

supporter of Ron Paul (Needham, 2018). Mike Enoch (Peinovich), the

creator of the infamous Daily Shoah podcast, embarked on his journey
towards the alt-right by imbibing the work of Ayn Rand, Murray
Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises (Marantz, 2017). As Counter-
Currents’ editor Gregory Hood (2016) remarks, for many, including
himself, Rothbard’s libertarianism was a ‘gateway drug’ to open flirta-
tion with the far right.
In recent years, Rothbard’s importance to contemporary formations
of the American far right has prompted some serious reflection among
scholars of neoliberalism (Slobodian and Plehwe, 2019). As the foremost
American disciple of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises,
Rothbard undoubtedly sits within the broad constellation of American
neoliberalisms. But until recently, the specifically libertarian currents that
were inspired by Von Mises in the US have seemed too marginal and
devoid of policy influence to warrant serious consideration. As studies on
the Chicago and Virginia schools of neoliberalism have abounded
(Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009; Biebricher, 2018; MacLean, 2017),
American libertarianism has largely remained outside the purview of
critical scholarship. Tellingly perhaps, the few serious inquiries into
Rothbard’s work come from within the libertarian movement itself or
from critical studies of the American far right (Casey, 2010; Doherty,
2007; Lyons, 2018; Skousen, 2005).
Today, however, American libertarianism is becoming difficult to
ignore, given the obvious contribution of think tanks such as the
Alabama-based Ludwig von Mises Institute to the rise of the alt-right.
That neoliberals have routinely collaborated with various complexions of
social conservatism is well-established. And yet the driving forces behind
the alt-right correspond to none of the previously recognized alliances:
this is not the neoliberal neoconservatism of the Reagan and George W.
Bush years, nor the neoliberal communitarianism of the Third Way or
the European ordoliberals, nor even a (state-based) authoritarian neoli-
beralism (Cooper, 2017; Slobodian, 2018; Brown, 2019; Bruff and Tansel,
2020). Instead, as suggested by Rothbard’s long-time collaborator,
Llewellyn H. (Lew) Rockwell Jr., the alt-right involves an alliance
between libertarianism and ‘paleo’ (as opposed to ‘neo’) conservatism
(Rockwell, 1990: 35). This paper traces the contours of this ‘paleoliber-
tarian’ alliance, first by following the volatile political trajectory of
Murray Rothbard and, second, by placing paleoconservatism within
the longer history of the American far right. Although libertarianism
itself can and does take more or less culturally liberal forms, each of
them traversed by Murray Rothbard at some point in his career, paleo-
conservatism makes for a uniquely powerful ally because it offers a work-
able response to libertarianism’s intrinsic contradictions. By pairing
freedom from the state with the assertion of absolute servitude in the
realm of private, interpersonal relations, paleoconservatism resolves the
Cooper 31

contradiction between economic freedom and property rights in a way

that no other political position can match. This ambivalent appeal to
freedom has long been a hallmark of the states’ rights and neo-
Confederate traditions of the American South, whose melancholic
attachment to slavery expresses itself as a will to armed insurrection
against a freedom-suppressing federal government. As such, the paleoli-
bertarian alliance – and its popular expression as the alt-right – lend
themselves to both short-range and longue durée analysis, as enduring
symptoms of the American far right.

Murray Rothbard
Rothbard’s posthumous fame as a figurehead of the alt-right might seem
surprising to those familiar with his trajectory. Right up until his death in
1995, Rothbard remained faithful not only to Austrian economics, the
most marginal of currents in American neoliberalism, but also to the
most abstruse and unfashionable of methods within this current,
the deductive apriorism of Ludwig von Mises (Skousen, 2005: 107–9,
113–14; Doherty, 2007: 9–10, 247). A trained mathematician,
Rothbard was nevertheless convinced by his mentor that mathematical
models and statistical evidence were irrelevant to economic reasoning
and developed, instead, an intricate, almost scholastic philosophy of
market exchange that derived economic freedom and property rights
from Lockean natural law. From this foundation, he built up an uncom-
promising and (in the eyes of many) unrealistic vision of libertarian
politics, which would tolerate nothing less than the complete dismantling
of the state, the abolition of central banking and a return to so-called
honest money, that is, the commodity-money of gold and silver.
Rothbard’s American references were no less arcane. Just as the
American right was turning decisively in favour of Cold War militarism,
Rothbard chose to align himself with a now largely forgotten group of
early 20th-century libertarians who had opposed the foreign interven-
tionism of leaders such as Woodrow Wilson and decried the build-up
of the administrative state under the influence of the Progressive move-
ment (Raimondo, 2000: 45–8; Casey, 2010: 4–6).1 Not only were these
‘old right’ libertarians viscerally hostile to the New Deal, they wished to
repeal both the Federal Reserve Act, which had established the US’s first
central bank, and the 16th Amendment, which authorized the federal
government to collect income tax. In the eyes of these first-generation
libertarians, all taxation was theft and any attempt by government to
manage the money supply was a ruse to confiscate the public’s savings
through the dark arts of inflation. After the Second World War, these
anti-progressive isolationists retreated into obscurity, as Cold War para-
noia and big-state militarism became the dominant position on the
American right. Rothbard was one of the few to remain true to the cause.
32 Theory, Culture & Society 38(6)

Having consigned himself to the extreme political margins, Rothbard

developed a starkly dichotomous theory of power that saw the state as
the instigator of all violence and the market as a space of perfectly con-
sensual exchange relations, where force was only ever deployed legiti-
mately, in defence of person and property (2006 [1973]: 61–2). From his
Austrian mentors Ludwig van Mises and Carl Menger, Rothbard inher-
ited the idea that the subjective determination of value – a key insight of
the marginal counter-revolution to which Menger contributed – must be
counterbalanced by some perfectly stable money-token. This Rothbard
locates in the commodity money of precious metals – the hard money
whose immutable weight would appear to vouchsafe for its honesty as a
bearer of ever shifting evaluations of price (1994a: 12, 20). As long as it
circulates outside of state control, Rothbard seems to suggest, commod-
ity money can’t help but express the underlying value of economic rela-
tions and can therefore be relied upon to ensure the proper distribution
of spoils amongst productive and non-productive participants in a
market economy.
By invoking a monetary state of nature, situated at some imagined
point in the past, Rothbard is better able to make his case against the
state – an institution, he claims, that lacks all autonomous powers of
wealth creation and hence all legitimate claims to property. Although
he is otherwise indebted to Locke’s philosophy of natural rights,
Rothbard refutes the social contractarian theory of the state out of
hand: there was no peaceable transition from the world of primitive
exchange to the modern fiscal state, he claims, only a primal act of
dispossession that was subsequently repeated over and over again
(Rothbard, 2006 [1973]: 78). The state is thus an essentially parasitic
institution that feeds off the wealth of others and transfers its misbe-
gotten gains to its various dependants: the businesses that live off state
monopolies and subsidies, trade unions and the non-productive welfare
class (1994a: 86). Rothbard singles out taxation as the most obvious
form of expropriation exercised by the state; indeed, he follows the
antebellum Southern statesman John C. Calhoun in claiming that the
dividing line between tax producers and tax consumers is the first and
only salient class distinction (2006 [1973]: 64). But far more dangerous,
he believes, because less visible to the public, is the method of inflation,
a form of taxation by stealth that subtly redistributes wealth from
creditors to debtors and from savers to consumers, thereby upsetting
the natural distribution of gains and losses that prevails in the state of
nature (Rothbard, 1963: 50, 86). This is why Rothbard is so fearful of
the modern institutions of money creation. Once it is unleashed from
the discipline of hard money, he argues, the state can all too easily live
beyond its means, funding itself through the extortionary instruments
of public borrowing, always ultimately paid for in taxes, and the infla-
tion of the money supply, a sleight of hand that utterly destroys the
Cooper 33

natural distribution of income, turning rightful winners into losers and

vice versa (1963: 52; 1994a: 145).
Few of the innovations of modern banking escape Rothbard’s suspi-
cion. From legal tender laws to paper money and fractional reserve bank-
ing, Rothbard perceives any departure from the pure gold standard as a
descent into fraudulence and legalized counterfeiting (1963: 64–81;
1994a: 27). But his paranoia is extreme when it comes to central banking,
an institution, he is convinced, that was created with the sole aim of
inflating the money supply and defrauding producers and savers of
their hard-earned wealth. In his voluminous writings on money and
banking, Rothbard imbues the Federal Reserve with all the malign
powers of action-at-a-distance that far-right conspiracy theorists more
often ascribe to international financiers and the Jews. The Fed, he writes,
is by far the ‘most secret and least accountable operation of the federal
government’, far more secretive than the CIA or any other intelligence
organization (1994a: 3). Where money in its primitive state is all trans-
parency and honesty, a mere veil through which the solidities of precious
metal can be clearly discerned, the Federal Reserve’s money-issuing
operations are shrouded in mystery, its machinations deliberately con-
cealed from the eyes of an unwitting public. If ‘the public knew what was
going on, if it was able to rip open the curtain covering the inscrutable
Wizard of Oz,’ Rothbard writes, ‘it would soon discover that the Fed, far
from being the solution to the problem of inflation, is itself the heart and
cause of the problem’ (1994a: 11). The accusation strains credulity given
that central banks have spent the last half century attempting to suppress
inflation, whatever the political costs to incumbent leaders. Yet
Rothbard remains steadfast in his conviction that the Federal Reserve
is an immense ‘socialist’ machine for inflating the money supply and thus
engineering a ‘criminal’ redistribution of wealth from deserving produ-
cers and creditors to undeserving consumers and debtors (1963: 86).
Acting in concert, inflation and progressive taxation are the leading
instruments through which the modern fiscal state feeds off the hard
work of unwitting citizens, draining the producers of their lifeblood
and transfusing it into the veins of a parasitic welfare class.
Having established the essential criminality of its methods, Rothbard
will settle for nothing less than total insurrection against the state. His
absolutist (and to many on the right, near treasonous) opposition to
American imperial power led him to form a tactical alliance with the
New Left in the 1960s, with whom he shared the minimal desire to
‘smash the state’ (Raimondo, 2000: 151–77; Doherty, 2007: 336–41).
But whereas Rothbard’s Marxist and anarchist allies saw the state as
inextricably tied to capitalism and nurtured an ideal of egalitarian and
collectivist social relations against the state, Rothbard opposed the state
because it disrupted the free market, which he saw as the crucible of
natural inequalities. Rothbard’s relationship with his New Left allies
34 Theory, Culture & Society 38(6)

reached a breaking point in the early 1970s when he tried to convince

them that inequality was not only natural but ethical, because it reflected
the biological variation in individuals’ ability to produce wealth (2000a
[1974]: 1–20). As enthused as he was by the New Left’s animus against
the state, Rothbard had nothing but scorn for their sentimental
egalitarianism.
Rothbard was similarly contemptuous of the Chicago and Virginia
school neoliberals who preached market freedom but inexplicably lost
courage when it came to the state’s most vital functions – control of the
money supply, security and the law (1963: 2; 2000b [1974]: 79). In lieu
of Milton Friedman’s monetarist rule instructing the central bank to
curb inflation by micromanaging the money supply, Rothbard called
for pure and simple abolition of the Federal Reserve and a return to a
100 per cent metallic standard, with silver and gold coins minted by
weight and all notes redeemable against equivalent warehouse reserves
of precious metal (1994a: 146). Only such an extreme measure, he
believed, would prevent the state from resorting to counterfeit and
fraud. But Rothbard went one step further still – further than most
libertarians even – in calling for the complete privatization of defence
and police forces, to be supplanted by mercenaries and militia, and the
replacement of the legal system by privately contracted law courts (2006
[1973]: 267–99).
In all arenas of state power, Rothbard preferred a strategy of radical
secession. Here again he invoked the work of John C. Calhoun, the
senator from antebellum South Carolina who championed the right of
Southern states to secede from the Union and thus escape the unjust tax
burdens imposed by the North. But why stop short at the state,
Rothbard asked? Why not push the strategy of secession to the limit
and grant every municipality, school, church, family and indeed indivi-
dual the right to defect from government rule (2000b [1974]: 75–8)? This
was not simply a pacifist solution, since Rothbard also argued that the
state had transgressed on the natural rights of individuals and had there-
fore triggered the right of every individual to arm himself in self-defence.
Indeed, Rothbard’s thought process seems to lead to the logical conclu-
sion that productive citizens should take up arms not only against
the state but also against the many parasites who feed off its largesse –
the non-producers and the welfare recipients. After all, aren’t they the
modern beneficiaries of the special privileges and unearned income once
reserved for the feudal elite (2006 [1973]: 12–13)?
It is impossible to read Rothbard’s reflections on anti-state violence
without being aware of the relentless identification between state para-
sitism, black welfare queens and undocumented migrants in right-wing
American political discourse. And it is difficult to read his repeated invo-
cations of John C. Calhoun without also hearing the states’ rights and
white supremacist arguments that Calhoun’s name has so often justified
Cooper 35

(Ford, 1996). The studiously neutral language Rothbard uses to

denounce the state doesn’t make the threat less legible or menacing.
Yet remarkably, in his earlier work, Rothbard does stop short of trans-
lating his indictment of the welfare state into a call for white supremacist
terrorism and instead advocates a rigorous questioning of the economic
status quo, to determine whether the origins of any given property title
are legitimate or not. Rothbard is so conscientious in his pursuit of this
task that he goes so far as to call for a restitution of American Indian
lands to their original owners and reparations for the heirs of former
slaves (1998 [1982]: 63–76; cf. Doherty, 2007: 339). In much of his early
work, in fact, Rothbard appears to be torn between the idea that liber-
tarian principles should apply universally – independently of gender, race
and class – and the belief that the unequal distribution of wealth and
income is ordained by natural law. This tension leads him to affirm, on
the one hand, that libertarianism must break with all inherited privileges
and all hierarchies of social status (2006 [1973]: 10, 17) and, on the other,
to assert with equal conviction that ‘inequality ... is rooted in the biolo-
gical nature of man’ and hence (one must assume) inheritable (2000a
[1974]: 8). The contradiction is flagrant but ultimately insoluble within
the terms of economic libertarianism itself. Why, after all, would the
transmission of privilege cease to be problematic when it is authorized
on biological rather than political grounds?
The stubbornness of this contradiction no doubt accounts for the
extreme flightiness of Rothbard’s alliances, which saw him careen back
and forth across the political spectrum, from the traditionalist new right
of William F. Buckley’s National Review in the 1950s, to the anti-war
countercultural New Left in the 1960s and 70s and back to the paleo-
conservative far right in the 1990s. When Rothbard distanced himself
from the National Review in the late 1950s it was not only on account of
their imperialist and nationalist tendencies but also because of their
obsession with ‘the preservation of tradition’ (1968: 50). It was under
the influence of the New Left that Rothbard wrote his most excoriating
denunciations of American state power, extending his sights from
America’s imperial ventures and war crimes in South-East Asia to the
state’s violations of civic freedom at home – from the war on drugs to
censorship laws and the criminalization of abortion. But as Rothbard
moved on to a new institutional home, the Koch-funded Cato Institute,
in 1977, he became less tolerant of his erstwhile friends on the New Left
and began to look askance too at the free-market cultural libertarians
who were being courted by the Cato Institute and Libertarian Party at
the time (Raimondo, 2000: 235–41, 263–6; Doherty, 2007: 411–18). After
being ousted from the Cato Institute in 1981, Rothbard joined the
Ludwig von Mises Institute at the invitation of his long-time friend,
the traditionalist libertarian, Lew Rockwell Jr. Here Rothbard’s politics
swung decisively to the right and over the following years he dedicated
36 Theory, Culture & Society 38(6)

countless articles to attacking the positions of his former allies

(Raimondo, 2000: 257–301; Doherty, 2007: 558–65).
The fact that these allies were guilty of professing many of the same
opinions that Rothbard himself had once defended was irrelevant.
Absolutism was Rothbard’s one constant. Having once decried the mind-
less traditionalism of Buckley’s National Review as inimical to the cause of
freedom, Rothbard was now advising his fellow libertarians not to assume
that ‘individuals are only bound to each other by the nexus of market
exchange’ since ‘everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language,
and a culture’ with its specific ‘traditions’ and customs (1994c: 1). And
the same Rothbard who had railed against the Cato Institute’s ambiva-
lence on the question of free migration would soon be convinced that
economic freedom required strong borders (Doherty, 2007: 417).
Tellingly, Rothbard’s take on the right to self-defence now descended
into outright racism. In a 1994 review of Charles Murray’s and Richard
Herrnstein’s book The Bell Curve, Rothbard noted approvingly that the
authors’ ‘recognition of inheritance and natural inequalities among races
as well as among individuals knocks the props out from under the wel-
fare state system’ (1994b: 8).2 Rothbard was now convinced that the
inequities of the American economic system reflected intrinsic differences
of merit and concluded that any attempt to redress the status quo
amounted to a criminal extortion of fairly acquired wealth. The produc-
tive citizen therefore had every right to strike back in self-defence, not
only against the state but also against its dependants. The ‘racialist
science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression
of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defence
of private property against assaults by aggressors’ (1994b: 10).

Paleolibertarianism
When Patrick J. Buchanan ran for the presidential nomination in the
early 1990s, Rothbard and Rockwell put their weight behind his cam-
paign, hoping he would vindicate their dream of a new alliance between
libertarianism and paleoconservatism. Rockwell referred to this fusion of
movements as ‘paleolibertarianism’ (Rockwell, 1990: 35). The term
‘paleoconservatism’ was itself a neologism: it referred to a splinter move-
ment on the American right that had gained self-consciousness in oppo-
sition to the rising fortunes of the neoconservatives in the 1980s.3
Gathered together around the magazine Chronicles, the self-identified
paleoconservatives saw themselves as the defenders of an older, more
authentic right, one that they variously identified with the protectionist
nationalism of the 19th-century Republican Party or the antebellum nos-
talgia of Southern Democrats.
This they contrasted with the relative progressivism of the New York-
born neoconservatives, who in their eyes were far too tainted by their
Cooper 37

Trotskyist origins to be included within the pantheon of the American

right (Scotchie, 2017: 5). As children of Jewish and Irish immigrants, the
neoconservatives represented an urban, multicultural America that was
deeply suspicious to these Southern-identified intellectuals. The neocon-
servatives had made peace with New Deal America: they saw civil rights
(but not black power or affirmative action) as an important step forward
on the road to American freedom and accepted social welfare as a neces-
sary function of the modern state, as long as it performed the role of
protecting traditional gender roles. All of this was anathema to the
paleoconservatives, who remained committed to the old, anti-New
Deal right of small government and anti-internationalism. The paleocon-
servatives were particularly alarmed by the neocons’ belligerent defence
of democratic freedoms around the world. They rightly predicted that the
alliance between Israel and the United States – a neoconservative fetish –
would commit the US to reckless imperialist wars, long after the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the natural death of Cold War anti-communism.4 As
such, they were as hostile to the ‘liberal internationalism’ of George W.
Bush as they were to Obama (Scotchie, 2017: 7–8). At the national level,
they called for a stricter imposition of border controls, stronger trade
protections, and military isolationism. At the state and local level, they
retreated into paranoid self-defence mode, convinced that their right to
local rule was under permanent threat of attack from a meddling federal
government.
The paleoconservatives built their sense of group identity around a
history of slights. Unceremoniously brushed aside by the neoconservative
modernizers during the Reagan presidency, shunned even by the more
hard-line exponents of the post-war new right represented by William F.
Buckley and the National Review, they spent many years tending to their
wounds as outsiders and extremists (Scotchie, 2017: 4–5). Conservatism
was too quiescent a word to capture the full force of their ambition.
More than simple conservatives, the paleocons saw themselves as reac-
tionaries and revolutionaries: their wilful archaism a spur to grand insur-
rectionist fantasies against the overbearing power of the state (Scotchie,
2017: 2). In this respect alone, they can be counted as a uniquely
American expression of fascism – concisely defined, by Peter Osborne,
as a form of revolutionary conservatism (Osborne, 1995: 162–8).
But such a claim finds further confirmation in the paleoconservatives’
elective affinity with the Southern Agrarians, the writers and literary
critics who infamously ‘took a stand’ on behalf of Southern states’
rights in the 1930s and went on to flirt with European fascism.5 Like
their forefathers, the paleoconservatives romanticized the pre-Civil War
South, which they perceived through the mists of European feudalism,
and lamented the loss of benevolent hierarchies in public and private life.
In 1981, 50 years after the publication of the manifesto I’ll Take My
Stand, the paleoconservatives produced a memorial collection to reflect
38 Theory, Culture & Society 38(6)

on the continuing relevance of the Southern Agrarians to American

political life. Here they reiterated their forefathers’ sense that the
American South – with its ‘difference and intransigence’ – had ‘some-
thing to say to a troubled nation’ and something unique to offer the
Western conservative tradition as a whole (Wilson, 1981: 2, 3). The
‘social fragmentation and demoralization that the Agrarians sought to
combat’ had ‘become much more evident and menacing’ since the man-
ifesto was first published (Wilson, 1981: 3). But almost alone among
American regions, the American South had ‘retained an unselfconscious
relationship with some of the ancient values of Western civilization that
[were] increasingly attenuated elsewhere’ and so offered a beacon of hope
to cultural conservatives throughout the United States and the Western
world (Wilson, 1981: 4).
The contributors to this volume included Thomas Fleming, a tradi-
tionalist Catholic who blamed racial desegregation and secularism for the
loss of American community; Clyde N. Wilson, editor of the collected
works of John C. Calhoun, the 19th-century Southern senator who has
long served as an intellectual figurehead to the states’ rights and white
supremacist movements; and the writer Samuel T. Francis, a prominent
disseminator of paleoconservative ideas. Each of these was involved with
the Southern Partisan review, a journal that espoused a revisionist history
of the Civil War (tax burdens rather than slavery, it was alleged, were the
true source of conflict between North and South) and defended white
Southerners in civilizational terms as a distinct ethnos whose traditions
and customs had been subject to a form of ‘cultural genocide’ (Hill and
Fleming, 1995). Southern Partisan laid the intellectual foundations for
the so-called neo-Confederate movement in the 1980s, a movement that
called on states and local communities across the nation to follow the
example of the South in seeking an exit route from the overbearing
weight of the federal government and Supreme Court (Hague and
Sebesta, 2008: 29). Appealing to Calhoun, the paleoconservatives
argued for the continuing legality of the doctrines of nullification and
secession: the idea, that is, that any state has the right to invalidate
federal law it considers unconstitutional and to separate from the
union on those grounds. If they would only avail themselves of these
dormant constitutional arms, urged the paleoconservatives, local govern-
ments, communities and ultimately families would be free to practice
segregation without punishment from the state; free also to run their
own institutions, in keeping with traditionalist Christian rules of morality
and gender difference; and free to defend themselves from both unwanted
outsiders and the federal government.
Along with libertarianism, the neo-Confederate movement has served
as a powerful source of inspiration for the many experiments in far-right
institution-building that proliferate in the United States today: the white
supremacist enclave, the home school, and the private militia.6 This, if
Cooper 39

nothing else, is the glue that unites libertarians and paleoconservatives:

so convinced are they of the fraudulence of state power that they are
willing to bear arms against the state if it threatens their independence in
any way. Indeed, they are persuaded that the government is secretly
intent on waging warfare against them – a conviction that gained wide-
spread currency in the 1990s, when local and state law enforcement
agencies inherited surplus military equipment from the federal govern-
ment and undertook a number of disastrous counterinsurgency opera-
tions against non-law-abiding white citizens (Churchill, 2010: 188–9).
Both movements are fascinated with the possibilities of decentralized
institution-building – the creation of militias, private law courts and
home-schooled families that will resist the overbearing power of the
federal bureaucracy (Lyons, 2018: 144–60). Together they define a style
of militancy that turns treason into virtue: a permanent readiness for civil
war that takes the old South’s resistance to the North as a general
model for resistance on both the local and national scale. But while
libertarians define their resistance in purely negative terms – as simple
freedom from the state – and sometimes extend this right to freedom into
the realm of gender and race relations, for paleoconservatives, freedom
from the state is only a necessary prelude to building new forms of
unfreedom in the private sphere. This was the tension that had to be
resolved before libertarians and paleoconservatives could forge a durable
alliance.
For Rothbard and Rockwell, such an alliance made sense on both
strategic and logical grounds. Rockwell complained that radical eco-
nomic libertarians such as those organized around the Libertarian
Party had condemned themselves to political insignificance by ignoring
the instinctive cultural conservatism of Middle America. By confusing
economic with sexual libertarianism, he claimed, the countercultural
wing of the Libertarian Party had alienated the great mass of
Americans who could have been natural allies, so instinctively distrustful
were they of the state (Rockwell, 1990: 35–6). Rothbard, for his part,
castigated the libertarians for their strategic tone-deafness when it came
to public communications. Although they ‘have often seen the problem
plainly,’ he observed, ‘as strategists for social change they have often
missed the beat’ (Rothbard, 1992: 7). Although Rothbard himself had
been a staunch advocate of Leninist avant-gardism during his time at the
Cato Institute, he now accused his former colleagues of investing too
much faith in the Hayekian credo that political change could best be
fomented from above, by a select cadre of intellectuals and militants
(p. 7).7 This had left the libertarians without a people to reach out to,
and too readily associated with the very elites they should be condemn-
ing. The solution must be ‘to tap the masses directly, to short-circuit the
dominant media and intellectual elites, to rouse the masses of people
against the elites that are looting them’ (p. 8) and the parasitic
40 Theory, Culture & Society 38(6)

underclasses they were playing host to. The solution, in short, was right-
wing populism. But since any populism must single out some group to
stand in as the true representative of the ‘people’, Rothbard immediately
added the proviso: ‘we must concentrate strategically on those groups
who are most oppressed and who also have the most social leverage’ (p.
8). In other words, what was needed was not only objective grievance but
also relative privilege: to be aggrieved was too mundane and democratic
a condition to ignite a far-right populism; what was also required was the
specific conviction amongst the aggrieved that they had been dispos-
sessed of something that was once rightfully theirs. The Cato Institute
libertarians had made the fatal mistake of catering to the educated and
well-to-do whites – constituencies who cherished their freedom from state
interference but were too upwardly mobile to feel any acute sense of
resentment against the state and its alleged beneficiaries. The paleoliber-
tarians, by contrast, would reach out to the ‘rednecks’ (p. 12) – the white
working and lower middle classes whose experience of economic uncer-
tainty and lost privilege had made them suitably ‘disgruntled’ and the
most ‘likely to nurse a deep grievance against the State’ (p. 10).
But beyond these strategic concerns, the alliance between paleocon-
servatives and free-market radicals also promised to resolve some of the
logical inconsistencies that plagued the pure economic libertarianism of
Rothbard’s early work. As noted by Rockwell, libertarians painted them-
selves into a corner by refusing all forms of coercion – private as well as
public – and deluded themselves when they argued that a free market
order could be sustained by purely voluntary contractual relations. As
long as it implied the protection of private property, a free market order
needed some recognition of law and some institution capable of admin-
istering violence – a point that libertarians implicitly conceded when they
turned to the solution of private militias and private law courts.
Paleoconservatives offered libertarians a way out of this conundrum by
acknowledging the fact that freedom from the state implied radical
unfreedom in the social or private sphere, where rigorous gender and
race hierarchies must hold sway. ‘Conservatives,’ Rockwell wrote,
‘have always argued that political freedom is a necessary but not suffi-
cient condition for the good society, and they’re right. Neither is it suffi-
cient for the free society. We also need social institutions and standards
that encourage private virtue, and protect the individual from the State’
(Rockwell, 1990: 34). Libertarians were ‘wrong to blur the distinction
between State authority and social authority, for a free society is but-
tressed by social authority. Every business requires a hierarchy of com-
mand and every employer has the right to expect obedience within his
proper sphere of authority. It is not different within the family, the
church, the classroom’ (p. 36). The salient distinction was between two
forms of authority – the ‘natural authority’ that ‘arises from voluntary
social structures’ and the ‘unnatural authority’ that is ‘imposed by the
Cooper 41

State’ (p. 36). If the latter was incompatible with economic freedom, the
former was its necessary counterpart.
Rothbard and Rockwell may have miscalculated with Pat Buchanan.
But their sense of long-term political strategizing was uncanny. With the
Ludwig von Mises Institute as its headquarters, the alliance between
paleoconservatives and libertarians continued to gain influence through-
out the 1990s. The alliance was consummated in 1995, when the Mises
Institute held a conference on ‘Secession, State and Economy’ in which
the libertarian principle of freedom from federal government intrusion
was stitched together with neo-Confederate demands for states’ rights,
racial segregation and a literal interpretation of Christian law (Hague
and Sebesta, 2008: 33). In the following years, the Institute would
become a hot-house for paleolibertarian scholars such as Hans-
Hermann Hoppe, the German American student of Rothbard who com-
bines Austrian economics with the ‘blood and soil’ imagery of European
fascism,8 and Thomas E. Woods, a founding member of the white supre-
macist League of the South and a leading exponent of the neo-
Confederate philosophy of nullification and secession (Tabachnik,
2013). Despite the Mises Institute’s libertarian origins, it was now reg-
ularly exchanging ideological positions and personnel with paleoconser-
vative organizations such as Southern Partisan, Chronicles and the
League of the South (Hague and Sebesta, 2008: 33). Their collective
message, radiated outwards across a network of publications such as
VDare, the Right Stuff and Taki’s Magazine, would come to define the
movement we now know as the ‘alt-right’.
Today, the role of paleolibertarianism in giving shape to this palpably
new configuration of the American far right is undeniable. Almost all of
the figures who self-identify as part of the alt-right are former supporters
of Ron Paul, raised on a diet of Rothbardian diatribes against the
Federal Reserve and neo-Confederate calls to militia warfare. Almost
all have been associated with the Mises Institute or its satellite organiza-
tions at some stage or another (Lyons, 2018: 15). Murray Rothbard’s
comment that the paleolibertarian movement needed a presidential
nominee who would ‘take the fight to the Republican convention’ and
explode the GOP from within may have been premature when it came to
Pat Buchanan (Rothbard, 1992: 14). But it is eerily prescient when it
comes to the rise of Trump and the utterly disintegrative role he has
played within the Republican Party establishment.

Post-Libertarianism on the Alt-Right

This is not to say that the fault lines between libertarians and paleocon-
servatives have been completely extinguished. In fact, they are widening –
not in spite of but precisely because of Trump’s success in translating
paleolibertarian ideas onto the national stage. It is remarkable in this
42 Theory, Culture & Society 38(6)

regard how many of the key figures on the alt-right have begun to mark
their distance from libertarianism. These include Matthew Heimbach,
whose now defunct Traditionalist Worker Party claimed allegiance to
the 25-point program of the early Nazi party; Richard Spencer, who in
recent interviews claims that he ‘is not a libertarian’ (‘I grew out of that
phase’) (Spencer, 2018: 2:30–2:35); Mike Enoch (Peinovich), host of the
Daily Shoah, who has renounced his earlier libertarianism in favour of
anti-Semitic ‘anti-capitalism’ (SPLC, 2019); and the editor-in-chief of
Counter-Currents, Greg Johnson, who sees his publishing agenda as
that of promoting the ‘rich tradition of critiques of capitalism from the
right’ (Feltin-Tracol, 2016). The key reference points for these militants
could not be further removed from the libertarian intellectual sphere:
they include Gottfried Feder, the national socialist economist who first
inspired Hitler; the social credit theories of C.H. Douglas; Kerry Bolton,
a far-right theorist of money and banking based in New Zealand; Father
Charles Coughlin, the fascist sympathizer who criticized FDR’s New
Deal for not going far enough; and Alain de Benoist, the leading intel-
lectual of the French New Right and an ardent critic of capitalism from
the far right.9 These new intellectual horizons have ushered in a dramatic
change in political-economic strategy: while the paleolibertarians asso-
ciated with Rothbard and the Mises Institute hew to a radically secessio-
nist position, seeking ultimately to demolish the Federal Reserve and to
restore a world of entirely private money creation based on a pure gold
standard, the national socialist elements on the far right are intent on
taking over the government and central bank as key institutions of a
white ethno-state to come.
At first glance, the sudden conversion of so many alt-right figures from
paleolibertarianism toward a national social or ‘anti-capitalist’ far right,
unthinkable only a few years ago, may appear difficult to fathom. Yet it
is clearly foreshadowed in the work of key paleoconservative thinkers
who were always more ambivalent about the free market than their
libertarian brethren and who always had their own distinct sense of the
strategic long-game. Samuel F. Francis in particular foresaw the tensions
to come. In an essay on the prospects of a right-wing populism, published
at the time of Buchanan’s first campaign for the Republican presidential
nomination, Francis was at pains to stress the selective character of white
middle America’s opposition to welfare state capitalism: the paleocon-
servative ‘resentment of welfare, paternalism and regulation,’ he writes ‘is
not based on a profound faith in the market but simply a sense of
injustice that unfair welfare programs, taxes and regulation have bred’
(Francis, 1994: 72).10 Although it might look indistinguishable from lib-
ertarianism from the outside, then, middle American opposition to wel-
fare was entirely defensive and reactive, inspired by a sense of
helplessness before the perceived racial favouritism of the ‘managerial’
welfare state – hence liable to change in unexpected ways depending on
Cooper 43

the circumstances. If the ‘Middle American Radical’ coalition were to

gain some foothold in government, Francis suggested, it was doubtful it
would ‘continue to focus on the classical liberal principle’ of market
freedom. It was more likely that ‘MAR-Sunbelt interests [would] require
a strong governmental role in maintaining economic privileges for the
elderly and for unionized labor (where it now exists)’, that is to say, a
welfare state selectively oriented towards the interests of the white work-
ing and lower-middle classes (p. 71). Once in power, Francis predicted,
paleoconservatives would cast off their erstwhile libertarian allies and
instead become economic nationalists and protectionists. The
‘classical liberal idea of a night watchman state’ would be revealed as
an ‘illusion’ as the new middle American elite ‘would make use of the
state for its own interests as willingly as the present managerial elite
does’ (p. 72).
This was a position that Pat Buchanan had championed from the very
start. Although he was a fellow traveller of the paleoconservatives,
Buchanan was never won over by their secessionist fantasies and
sought instead to reconcile the utopia of political and cultural decentra-
lization with an overarching vision of national renewal. Indeed,
Buchanan saw the neo-Confederate will to secede as a symptom of
defeat – an admission that nationhood had become impossible in the
face of a globalizing, homogenizing elite: ‘The deconstruction of the
United States can be seen in resegregated student dorms, ethnic gangs,
a revival of ethnic and racial politics, secessionist movements in the
Southwest, all the way over to the white militias and the Southern
League’ (Buchanan, 1998: 113).11 Taking issue with the Southern agrar-
ian and neo-Confederate romanticization of Calhoun and all that he
represented – the strategy, that is, of nullification and secession –
Buchanan appealed to an alternative conservative tradition that included
the national mercantilism of Alexander Hamilton and the conservative
national-populism of Andrew Jackson (pp. 145–6). His 20th-century
heroes were Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican president turned
Progressive, and the industrialist Henry Ford, both of whom cham-
pioned a conservative corporatism founded on high wages for male
workers, strict workplace and industrial regulations, punishing import
tariffs, and maternalist welfare policies designed to subsidize women’s
labour as reproducers of the nation (pp. 93, 288). As Buchanan never
tired of repeating, the free-trade and open borders position of the late
20th-century Republican Party was an historical anomaly: up until the
1930s, the Republicans were protectionists and it was only in the 1980s,
with the personal about-face of Ronald Reagan, that the GOP unam-
biguously embraced the cause of free trade (Buchanan, 2007: 195, 202,
229). In so doing, Buchanan claimed, they betrayed middle America and
sapped the foundations of American nationhood and family life.
America had become a ‘land of middle-class anxiety, down-sized hopes
44 Theory, Culture & Society 38(6)

and vanished dreams, where economic insecurity is a pre-existing condi-

tion of life’ (Buchanan, 1998: 7).
Buchanan was concerned not only with a loss of principle amongst
conservatives but also with a failure of strategic common-sense. If they
continued too long in this direction, he warned, Republicans risked alie-
nating the culturally conservative ‘Reagan Democrats’ who had kept
them in power for so many years (Buchanan, 2007: 228–9). What was
to be done? Buchanan’s economic programme called on the GOP to
withdraw from all international free-trade deals, to deport all undocu-
mented migrants, to oversee ‘a deeper, wider distribution of property and
prosperity’ premised on the return of high-paying manufacturing jobs,
and to redistribute the tax burden from income on labour and produc-
tion to tariffs on imported consumer goods (p. 289).
Yet however unorthodox his ideas might appear when juxtaposed with
the instinctive neoliberalism of the late 20th-century Republican Party,
Buchanan’s economic nationalism remains legible as part of a once main-
stream Republican tradition that sought to reconcile the interests of
domestic free-trade with national protectionism. As his invocation of
the German ordoliberal, Wilhelm Röpke, might suggest, Buchanan is
intent on containing market freedom within the bounds of the ‘organic
nation’ and its local communities of family, faith and tradition, not
abolishing it altogether (Buchanan, 1998: 288–9). Crucially, his economic
nationalism stops short at the all-important question of money creation,
which he thinks should be kept as far as possible in private hands and, in
the case of the Federal Reserve, quarantined from the interventionist
hand of government. Thus, he represents a fusion of paleoconservative,
nationalist and classical liberal positions.
The more recent exponents of anti-capitalism on the alt-right belong to
a different tradition altogether, one that has never hesitated to infringe
on market freedom – even and especially when it comes to the crucial
question of money creation. The most extreme example of this alternative
lineage can be found in the political programme of the now defunct
Traditionalist Worker Party, which resurrected the ideas of the
German National Socialists to call for the cancellation of all ‘usurious’
interest-bearing debt, including student loans, the abolition of the
Federal Reserve as a semi-private entity independent of government,
and the complete nationalization of banking and money creation in the
service of a (white) workers’ state. ‘The clearest way the global and
Jewish elites control America is through the Federal Reserve and the
current banking system. We will end the Federal Reserve and replace it
with a national bank owned by and accountable to the citizenry. The
wealth of the nation is to be found in her resources and people, not fiat
currency loaned at usurious interest that enslaves the nation for all gen-
erations to the internationalist elements’ (Traditionalist Worker Party,
2017). The Traditionalist Worker Party has now closed shop, but such
Cooper 45

ideas have widespread currency on the ‘post-libertarian’ margins of the

alt-right. The work of the New Zealand based scholar Kerry Bolton has
played a particularly important role in disseminating the ‘anti-capitalist’
economics of fascist thinkers such as Gottfried Feder, Hjalmar Schacht
(Hitler’s central banker) and Father Charles Coughlin, each of whom
were interested in the possibilities of a fully politicized system of state
money creation, liberated from the whims of private financiers and inter-
national credit markets (Bolton, 2017). This represents an extreme depar-
ture from the libertarianism of Murray Rothbard: although it is wedded
to the sanctity of private property, national socialism as an economic
doctrine has no respect at all for market (that is to say, contractual)
freedom. Its vision of the ideal economic sphere is one that is totally
reabsorbed in the non-contractual, organic hierarchies of race, gender
and tradition.
Trump, inevitably, has disappointed – he stands accused of being too
soft on Wall Street financiers and migrants, of renouncing isolationism
with his airstrike on Syria (Spencer, 2018) – but he has also sharpened the
dividing lines within the alt-right and arguably triggered a deep shift in
the alt-right’s centre of equilibrium, from paleolibertarianism to a new,
post-libertarian, paleo-national socialist position. Now that former
President Donald Trump has improbably brought paleo ideas into the
broad light of day, openly mouthing the words of Pat Buchanan –
‘America first’ and ‘build the wall’ – the secessionism of the paleoliber-
tarian movement is beginning to appear redundant. Why revile the state
and its social welfare institutions when they can be taken over? Without
renouncing any of the paleoconservative positions espoused by Rothbard
and his ilk – the visceral hatred of blacks, Jews, Muslims, women, gays
and trans people – younger militants such as Spencer and Heimbach have
been less enthusiastic about his libertarianism. As Richard Spencer com-
plained in a recent interview, ‘I would have preferred universal health
care, I would have been more enthusiastic with Trump if instead of
ending Obamacare and cutting taxes and all this kind of stuff, if he
had said we are going to have an FDR style social program. We are
going to rebuild infrastructure, we are going to put people to work,
building the wall but also doing other things’ (Spencer, 2019: 3:43–
3:53). Trump has disappointed then, but he has also emboldened. Now
that the far right has a sense of what it can achieve on the national scale,
it wants to go further. The national social turn expresses a new triumph-
alism on the radical right – a hope that the purified social orders which
for many years have been nurtured in miniature, in various enclave
spaces, can now become the model of a white ethno-state to come.
Although still very much in process, this recent reconfiguration of the
American far right serves as a useful reminder of what is politically at
stake in the appeal to market freedom. As Samuel Francis observed,
popular attachment to neoliberalism – or indeed, libertarianism – is
46 Theory, Culture & Society 38(6)

much more fluid than one might expect. We need only consider the rapid
breakdown of the New Deal electoral coalition in the 1970s and the
defection of many former working-class voters to the Republican right
to understand that attachment to the welfare state is contingent upon a
sense of who should be included and who should be excluded from the
state’s largesse. The states’ rights and Southern Agrarian critique of big
government was always undergirded by a specific fear of racial redistri-
bution, so when this threat diminishes it is hardly surprising that liber-
tarianism subsides along with it. Today, middle-class whites (or those
whose family background led them to expect a middle-class life) are more
likely than ever to feel that they too are threatened by abandonment from
the state. And as long as someone in power is willing to promise them a
selective distribution of benefits, it is possible that their economic pre-
ferences will drift towards national welfarism. This too serves as a remin-
der that economic positions commonly associated with the left can be as
politically ambivalent as libertarianism. The far right, after all, has a long
history of ‘anti-capitalism’: for this reason alone, we cannot assume that
the critique of neoliberalism will belong to progressives.

Notes
1. The ‘old right’ libertarians included such figures as Frank Chodorow, H. L.
Mencken, Garet Garrett, Robert Taft and Alfred Jay Nock. Rothbard’s own
perspective on this alternative rightist tradition can be found in Rothbard
(2007 [1991]).
2. I am indebted to John Ganz (2017) for drawing attention to this publication.
3. For an insider perspective on paleoconservatism, see Scotchie (2017). And for
an outsider perspective, see Kolozi (2017: 170–1).
4. For a revealing insight into the paleoconservative perspective on neoconser-
vatism and its faults, see Gottfried and Fleming (1988: 59–76). Gottfried
(the son of a Jewish refugee) and Fleming are particularly interesting on
the specificity of neoconservatism as a right-wing movement shaped by the
Jewish migrant experience, hence instinctively inclined to distrust the
Southern agrarian tendencies on the American right.
5. The Southern Agrarians were a group of 12 poets, novelists and critics, many of
them based at Vanderbilt University, who developed a romantic and reaction-
ary critique of industrialism from the point of view of the South. In 1930, they
published a manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian
Tradition, using the collective authorial name of ‘Twelve Southerners’. For an
analysis of the Southern Agrarian flirtation with European fascism, via their
involvement with the magazine American Review, see Brinkmeyer (2009: 24–70).
6. On the recent evolution of far-right militia movements in the US, see
Crothers (2019). According to Crothers, the 1990s militia movement experi-
enced a lull in the early 2000s but underwent a rapid expansion after the
election of Barack Obama and the rise of the Tea Party and Birther move-
ments. A number of new militia movements have proliferated alongside the
rise of the alt-right and have taken an active part in their public
Cooper 47

demonstrations. In contrast to their forerunners in the 1990s, these new

militias are much more openly white supremacist.
7. On Rothbard’s Leninism, see Bessner (2014).
8. On Hoppe and his connections to the German AfD, see Quinn Slobodian
and Dieter Plehwe (2019).
9. See the translations collected in Bolton (2016) for an overview of these far-
right theories of money.
10. I am indebted to Kolozi (2017: 183–4) for drawing attention to this text. It
should be noted that other paleoconservative figures, most notably Paul
Gottfried, remained faithful to the paleoconservative-libertarian alliance.
11. For an insightful analysis of Buchanan’s anti-libertarianism, see Kolozi
(2017: 178–83).

ORCID iD
Melinda Cooper https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8341-8282

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Melinda Cooper is Professor in the School of Sociology at the Australian

National University. She is the author of Family Values: Between
Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017).

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special issue on ‘Post-
Neoliberalism?’, edited by William Davies and Nicholas Gane.